Articles
Alongside Los Angeles’ mainstream exhibition spaces, an eddy of alternative art venues swirl for a time, submerge and disappear, enjoying varying degrees of notice. A few of these combine entrepreneurial efforts along with more altruistic programming, reflecting the...
After I received my MFA in the early ’90s, this country was in the midst of a serious economic downturn and alternative gallery spaces were beginning to crop up here and there. They opened in garages, storefronts and artists’ homes. They were places where artists...
Nearly all of Chris Burden’s numerous and generally laudatory obituaries include in the title or first line, “...the artist who had himself shot.” Beyond the immediate and not so subtle insinuation of craziness—“People thought he was nuts,” an admiring Ed Moses told...
Of late, I have been selling various valuable paper collectibles online. First to go were the early punk flyers and fanzines. Now it’s time to part with a collection of Raymond Pettibon limited edition “art zines,” as they are sometimes called on eBay. Despite being...
A trip to New Orleans is a voyage through time, through a history thick with contradictory layers, heated by much tragedy and some absurdity. Hurricane Katrina wasn’t the first tragedy that disrupted the city, and it won’t be the last. It’s no accident that Tennessee...
Los Angeles has lost one of its most important and influential artists: Rachel Rosenthal. A pioneer of avant-garde theater and performance art, Rosenthal inspired several generations of actors, artists and activists. She was also a good friend and spiritual mother to...
Michael Govan has given a lot of thought to Los Angeles’ identity as a center for culture. While it may go without saying the opportunity to reshape an institution brought him to LA in 2006, if he is successful in revitalizing the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he...
After dodging the reporters and cameramen that were shooting footage of Leonard Nimoy’s star for memorial news coverage on Hollywood Boulevard, I was buzzed into Glenn Kaino’s studio and escorted up to the second floor by an assistant. Once face to face with the...
For 11 years, Cliff Benjamin and Erin Kermanikian have co-owned Western Project in Culver City. Together they exhibit work that’s consistently challenging and boundary-breaking, representing artists like Tom of Finland (before he was MOCA-acceptable), Bob Flanagan and...
“I understand and appreciate clean-made art, but what I’m mostly attracted to is something raw and more guttural. That’s what brought me to the outsider art world. Plus there’s no other gallery in LA that’s showcasing outsider art,” says Paige Wery, erstwhile golfer,...
The auction market, and in particular the salerooms of the two major auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have long been a proving ground for the marketplace maturity of every kind of specialty commodity, including fine art. Auction houses have aggressively...
When looking at art one considers line, shape, volume, the play of light across pigment. When looking at Los Angeles, one considers other lines. The stark divide between the haves and have-nots is as tangible as the freeways that divide one neighborhood from another....
An interview with Paris Photo LA’s new director, Florence Bourgeois, and the new artistic director, Christoph Wiesner, was the first thing on my agenda for the fair this year. I wanted to get from Bourgeois and Wiesner a sense of what changes or innovations they hope...
Prestidigitator, composer, engineer and conceptual artist Nahum hails from Mexico City, has lived in London for many years after a degree from Goldsmith’s College, but really, he belongs anywhere. Recently he and eight other Mexican artists, along with a Mexican...
IN THE BEGINNINGThere is something about abstraction. The concept of the non-pictorial, non-mimistic image is unique in art, and in the world. Sometimes it seems to me that there is abstract art, and then there is everything else. This is what Ad Reinhardt meant when...
Los Angeles painter James Hayward taught a USC graduate seminar in 1987. That was my introduction to him. He wasn’t much of a teacher, but he sure was a talker. He sat in a chair front and center in the classroom with his legs stretched wide open. When he would get...
Think about the differences between the long-standing practices of painting and sculpture, and clichés persist: Painting is “flat,” sculpture is not; paintings go on a wall, sculptures do not. In contemporary art these separate paths often intersect; some notable...
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